Effect of Negative Instances in Concept Acquisition Using a Verbal Learning Task. Tech Memo Number 71.

Tennyson, Robert D.

An experiment replicated and extended a previous study on the value of negative instances in concept learning (i.e., an instance of something which does not exemplify the concept helps to make clear what the concept is). In this experiment, the concept to be learned was "adverb". The subjects were seventh grade students. Some groups of subjects read sentences in which the adverb was identified. Other groups of subjects read pairs of sentences; in one of these sentences, the word was used as an adverb and was identified as such, and in the other sentence, the same word was used as a different part of speech. The different function the word served in each sentence of the pair was apparent. Results showed that subjects learned the concept of adverb better when the negative example was available. (JK)